Farewell Transit City... We Hardly Knew Ye

Earlier this week the new mayor of Toronto announced that he had killed the plan to vastly expand the city's light rail network called Transit City (see the map below for the proposed routes). All the studies had been done and the shovels had gone into the ground. So instead of bringing rapid transit lines to areas all over the city the mayor has elected to go back to the drawing board and start another study; pretty much guaranteeing that it is going to be years before we get to see any substantial improvements to the public transit system. The preference for subways pretty much guarantees that any expansion will not be as extensive as that called for in Transit City. Personally I find this decision disappointing to say the least. Earlier today I went to the site of construction of the first line to say goodbye to Transit City.

Farewell Transit City... We Hardly Knew Ye

Camp X

In December of 1941 Camp X was established on the shore of Lake Ontario. 69 years later (2 days after Remembrance Day here in Canada) I went there and took these photos in remembrance of some who aren't usually thought of when people think of Remembrance Day:

Camp X

A November Sunday in Port Credit and Back

Went out to Port Credit in Mississauga this afternoon and took some pictures. I took a couple shots of Diwali celebrations in the Gerrard India Bazaar on my way back. Here's the route I took:


View A November Sunday in Port Credit and Back in a larger map

and the pictures:

A November Sunday in Port Credit and Back

Walk through the Don Valley

Took my my new camera for a walk through the Don Valley today. Went from the Science Centre down to Gerrard St. It was too bad we had a bunch of wind earlier this week. I suspect it would've been a lot more colourful last weekend but at any rate. Here are the results.

Here's the Map as recorded with the MyTracks app for Android:

View Saturday Walk in the Don Valley in a larger map

And the photos:

Saturday Walk in the Don Valley

kev.

Resizing the /boot Partition in OpenSUSE Linux

So after a couple of weeks (it was my home machine not a critical production server) of seeing the latest kernel update failing on my OpenSUSE 11.2 system because there wasn't enough space on the /boot partition I finally had to deal with this. Trouble is I had no idea how to deal with this. I've resized /home before but /home is right at the end of the drive array so shrinking it and growing it is relatively easy with the disk partitioning tool in YaST.

So with the help of this article http://www.timelordz.com/blog/?p=456 here's what I did.

From the command line I went into init 1 with the command:

su

Then the root password.

init 1

It'll shut down just about everything running and bring you to a prompt asking for the root password to enter maintenance mode. I again entered the root password then unmounted /home with:

umount /home

Then I brought up the command line version of yast with

yast

and brought up the partitioning tool and changed the size of the partition that gets mounted at /home (I brought it down by 1.5 GB). I've been caught in yast resizing partitions before with not entering the GB (or MB or TB) after the number. It took a while with this operation as the /home partition is fairly large but in the end I had 1.5 GB of unpartioned space.

Once done I went back into run level 5 by typing

init 5

The next step was to create a 1.5 GB partition and following the article in the link above I named it newboot. This was easy enough again using the partitioner in yast.

Once that was done again following along with the article I copied the contents of /boot into /newboot as root

cp --verbose --recursive /boot/* /newboot

The next step was to edit the /newboot/grub/menu.lst file. Trouble was that it wasn't immediately clear to me what to change it to. After a bit of trial and error (not really advisable when dealing with bootloaders I know!) I found that the newboot partition was at (hd0,9) in grubspeek (the old one was hd0,4). So, I got them changed over in menu.lst, crossed my fingers and typed 'reboot'.

When the thing booted I was quite pleased with myself until I realised that it was still booting from the old /boot partition. The fix was easy if a bit scary. I hadn't done the bit from the article where it says to:

# grub
grub> root (hd0,9)
grub> setup (hd0)
grub> quit
# reboot

So again crossed my fingers and typed reboot.

This time it booted but didn't have the fancy grub menu that openSUSE comes with. I then saw that I hadn't modified the gfxmenu line. I changed that to match the (hd0,9) of the kernel image I was wanting to boot from and all was good....

Well, at least until I tried to run the kernel update with:

zypper -n up

It was still erroring out saying there wasn't enough space on /boot to install. So, it's trying to install to /boot rather than /newboot. Makes sense, the standard place for it is /boot. No developer has any idea that I've gone and told my machine to boot from /newboot. So, back into the yast partitioning tool. I changed the mount point of /boot to /oldboot and that of /newboot to /boot saved the changes and rebooted just for good measure.

When the system came back up it booted from hd0,9 as written to the master boot record when I ran the commands at the grub prompt before. This time however the partition at (hd0,9) was being mounted as /boot rather than /newboot. So again I ran the update:

zypper -n up

This time with all the pieces in place the new kernel installed on my new 1.5GB /boot partition.

So thank you Pete Eby for the article that pointed me in the right direction.

Saturday Morning

It's funny how when you get up at a certain time every day for work when the one day that you've got to sleep in arrives you get up around the same time as you would have the rest of the week.  When I got up this Saturday at around seven in the morning I went for a walk and took some pictures of a Saturday morning starting at Trinity Bellwoods park; walking up to Dundas St. then south along Manning back to Queen St.  I then stopped off at City Hall to see the revitalization construction at Nathan Phillips Square and the roof-top gardens.

Have a look at the album in Picassa here: Saturday Morning

Add a Network Printer for All Users

If you've got a windows machine that multiple people log in to and a printer that's shared via windows printer sharing on  the network you've probably noticed that you have to go in to the add printer wizard for each user who logs into the workstation and add the network printer.  There is a way to add the printer globally so that--like a local printer the network printer is available for anyone who logs into the machine.

To add the global network printer log in as a user with administrative rights then open up a command prompt and type:

rundll32.exe Printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /ga /n"\\printServer\printQueName"


(Substitute 'printServer' for the hostname or ip address of your print server and 'printQueName' with the name of the printer as defined on the server.)


Don't worry if there's no output that's normal.  Then restart the print spooler windows service in the control panel --> administrative tools --> services.


That's it.  You're network printer should now be available to all users who log into that machine.


If at some point you want to remove the globally added printer you'll need to re-run the command from the command line.  Just change /ga to /gd then again restart the print spooler service.